Former New York Times writer Alex Berenson turned me into a lab leaker during a Joe Rogan podcast in December 2020. We discuss it all, including Ralph Baric’s genome, Egyptian fruit bats, and Fauci’s “satellite campus” at Rocky Mountain Lab (RML) in Hamilton, Montana.
Berenson was perplexed by my mechanical engineering background, as were many in this virology debate. As I previously wrote:
I’ll also remind SAGO that it took a Group of 36 outsiders — many of them aerosol specialists, HVAC designers, and mechanical engineers — to push the WHO to acknowledge airborne transmission. Those of us trained in fluid dynamics recognized the signal early because we understand how particles move indoors. Since aerosolization is central to transmission, we can identify the (lab) animals that created COVID before 2020.
Also, sitting on Vincent Munster’s RML desk are two books. The subject of one book is raising bats in a lab, and the other book's title is Aerosol Technology.
William C. Hinds, a mechanical engineering professor at UCLA, recently passed away. He wrote the Bible for someone like Munster who wants to aerosolize an agent, which describes relative humidity, particle size, and respiratory deposition on human (and bat) lungs.
Munster basically aimed for a massive viral load in the upper respiratory tract at a targeted temperature. Unfortunately, humans share a similar temperature and ACE2 receptors. Munster did all of this in Hamilton, Montana. Ironically, his aerosol delivery route allowed us to use peer-reviewed in vivo papers to prove an RML lab origin.
John Wells from Hamilton
Alex Berenson’s best-selling spy novels were based on a fictional character, John Wells, from Hamilton, Montana. Berenson said the choice of Hamilton was random because he needed a small town.
I open Chapter 26 of my wannabe spy novel on Fauci’s RML:
Hamilton, Montana, epitomizes small-town America. It has a McDonald’s and a shuttered Kmart but is too small for a Walmart. Scenes from the popular TV show Yellowstone are filmed there. Locals fly fish in the summer and hunt deer in the winter. It’s 75% Trump country, but 10% of the town’s 5,000 residents work at the giant US government lab. Locals call it “the Lab.” Five hundred scientists have come from as far away as India, Britain, Australia, Germany, and the Netherlands.
The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) traces its origins to a small lab established in the 1880s on Staten Island, New York. During this time, waves of European immigrants were arriving in America, some carrying cholera and other infectious diseases. Physicians lacked knowledge about the causes of these diseases and relied on clinical signs for diagnosis.
A young medical officer at the Staten Island lab isolated a cholera organism from an arriving European passenger. Later, this lab moved to Washington, D.C., where Congress authorized it to investigate “infectious and contagious diseases and matters pertaining to public health.” By the 1930s, it had become part of NIAID, which had eventually moved to Bethesda, Maryland.
As the American population expanded westward, early settlers in the Bitterroot Range of the Rocky Mountains encountered a disease known as “black measles” or “spotted fever.” In response, the US government dispatched a research team to Montana in 1902 to find the disease’s cause. The team operated out of tents, cabins, and an old schoolhouse. They discovered ticks transmitted “black measles” and developed a vaccine against the tick-borne disease.
Those tents, cabins, and “schoolhouse lab” evolved into Rocky Mountain Lab (RML) in the 1930s. RML became a “national vaccine factory” producing spotted fever, typhus, and yellow fever vaccines for American troops during World War II. In the 1970s, it studied Aleutian mink disease. The current lab’s director said RML was built on deer tick research. A water-filled moat once surrounded the RML campus to catch ticks escaping their experiments. They have since drained the moat, and the lab now focuses on biodefense and building live bat labs.
The RML director, Marshall Bloom, said, “The term biodefense became prominent, largely through Dr. Fauci’s efforts.” Bloom added, “In the aftermath of September 11, 2001, Dr. Fauci, in conversations with President George W. Bush, convinced the president to set up a big bio-defense program. And one element of that bio-defense program was to build a BSL4 facility out here at RML. We had the real estate to do it, and we had a group of scientists here who could do that work. The Bethesda campus of NIH didn’t have the real estate to build a facility like this on the main campus.”
Old picture of RML
The new BSL4 bat lab, or vivarium, below is being built next to the blue-roofed building above.
RML expansion
What started a hundred years ago as a tent for studying Rocky Mountain spotted fever has been expanded for the Chinese bat lab.
Building 34, marked by the black circle, is the new BSL4 bat lab for Munster and Heinz Feldmann, complete with positive-pressure suits and negative-pressure containment for their live bat experiments.
Building 28, marked by the orange square, was the older BSL-4 lab.
Red zone construction: a $25 million BSL2 Chinese bat breeding facility. Munster’s early COVID-19 vaccine trials used Egyptian fruit bats in Montana but required Dani Anderson’s testing on Chinese bats in Wuhan.
The new Montana facility eliminates that need. Since Munster developed COVID-19 in the older building 28 using an American lab bat (Egyptian fruit bats), they had to test a Chinese bat vaccine in Wuhan (with Dani in the Wuhan BSL4). Now Munster won’t have to send his bat vaccines to Wuhan for testing; he can breed live Chinese horseshoe bats in the BSL2 and walk from Building 28 to 34 to test them!
Lover’s spat & Feldmann moves to Fort Detrick
At Fort Detrick, a lovers’ spat between two scientists left a hole in a BSL4 spacesuit, but an NIH report claimed it was “not possible to determine the cause of the hole or who created it.”
Heinz Feldmann, who wouldn’t respond, was either promoted or demoted to Fort Detrick.
RML accident update
Marshall Bloom from RML issued a statement on the 2025 Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever accident (in Munster and Feldmann’s BSL4 lab):
“The individual remained well and showed no evidence of being infected. They have been back at work for some time,” RML Associate Director for Scientific Management Marshall Bloom stated in an email. “The biological incident reported occurred when an RML employee was found to be potentially exposed to Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever through an accidental breach of personal protective equipment,” NIH told the Ravalli Republic. “The employee was immediately isolated and monitored under appropriate care at a specialized medical facility before it was confirmed that no actual exposure or transmission had occurred. At no time was there any risk to the public or to other staff.”
RML must negotiate with local Hamilton hospitals to accept infected scientists, which seems challenging. As of 2014, no Montana hospitals were designated Ebola treatment centers.
Cute goats are sacrificed to the science gods
RML’s Nigerian dwarf goat is used in Rift Valley fever virus research.
The bats of RML
It’s very telling that Egyptian fruit bats are the reservoir host for SARS2. You don’t have to look hard to find them as the new American lab bat. Since they are easy to feed and breed, they serve as the pathway to publications. The University of California, Berkeley, is the latest school to establish a breeding colony.
We believe it is crucial to carefully select the appropriate model system for the scientific question at hand. Therefore, we utilize one of the most spatially, socially and acoustically sophisticated mammal on the planet – the bat (for example, when we utilized the bat — the only flying mammal – to ask how 3D space is represented in the hippocampus).
But the bats are not just for virology; they use them for neuroscience.
Neuroscientists at the University of California, Berkeley, wirelessly tracked the brain activity of Egyptian fruit bats as they flew throughout a custom flight room. When the researchers compared the bats’ flight paths with their neural readings, they found that the activities of the bats’ “place cells” — special type of neurons responsible for encoding an animal’s spatial position — were often more closely correlated with where the bats would be in the near future, rather than where they were in the moment…
Because the hippocampus is also a locus of many diseases, such as Alzheimer’s, where a person’s sense of location and memory is often disrupted, uncovering these basic neural computations could also give scientists a better understanding of disease-related impairment and help them devise more effective treatments.
Linfa Wang used his fruit bat colony (nectar) for heart disease and diabetes.
More bat vaccines and Dani Anderson
Days after Nature debates our bat vaccine theory, they are promoting bat vaccines.
Mosquitoes that have been designed to carry vaccines in their saliva have been used to inoculate bats against the rabies and Nipah viruses. Scientists are investigating whether this technique could stop such viruses from ‘spilling over’ from bats to people. But other researchers are sceptical about whether the strategy could be implemented in the wild.
Nature even referenced Dani Anderson:
Danielle Anderson, a virologist at the University of Melbourne in Australia, says that the study successfully shows that mosquitoes can deliver vaccines to bats in laboratory settings. But the experiments were conducted in animals that had not previously encountered the viruses. In reality, many bats already harbour viruses such as Nipah, so it is unclear whether vaccination would stop these bats from shedding the virus — a key step in preventing spillover to other animals, including humans.
Simon Wain-Hobson on airborne research
French virologist, Hobson, was part of the infamous 2012 ferret paper debate, but he didn’t mention Vincent Munster’s role in that paper.
Hobson makes it sound like anyone could aerosolize an agent after publication, but Munster’s boss, Ron Fouchier, made it clear this was specialized knowledge that could not be shared with any “lone wolf.”
Fouchier was right. You can’t share this knowledge with a lone wolf. Unfortunately for us, Munster already had it. He was experimenting with Egyptian fruit bats using the aerosol textbook in a Montana town of 5,000 people. Nobody was watching.
